Free The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens

deep air,
    The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
    Repeated in a summer without end
    And sound alone. But it was more than that,
    More even than her voice, and ours, among
    The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
    Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
    On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
    Of sky and sea.
                   It was her voice that made
    The sky acutest at its vanishing.
    She measured to the hour its solitude.
    She was the single artificer of the world
    In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
    Whatever self it had, became the self
    That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
    As we beheld her striding there alone,
    Knew that there never was a world for her
    Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
    Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
    Why, when the singing ended and we turned
    Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
    The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
    As the night descended, tilting in the air,
    Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
    Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
    Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
    Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
    The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
    Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
    And of ourselves and of our origins,
    In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
THE AMERICAN SUBLIME
    How does one stand
    To behold the sublime,
    To confront the mockers,
    The mickey mockers
    And plated pairs?
    When General Jackson
    Posed for his statue
    He knew how one feels.
    Shall a man go barefoot
    Blinking and blank?
    But how does one feel?
    One grows used to the weather,
    The landscape and that;
    And the sublime comes down
    To the spirit itself,
    The spirit and space,
    The empty spirit
    In vacant space.
    What wine does one drink?
    What bread does one eat?
MOZART, 1935
    Poet, be seated at the piano.
    Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
    Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
    Its envious cachinnation.
    If they throw stones upon the roof
    While you practice arpeggios,
    It is because they carry down the stairs
    A body in rags.
    Be seated at the piano.
    That lucid souvenir of the past,
    The divertimento;
    That airy dream of the future,
    The unclouded concerto…
    The snow is falling.
    Strike the piercing chord.
    Be thou the voice,
    Not you. Be thou, be thou
    The voice of angry fear,
    The voice of this besieging pain.
    Be thou that wintry sound
    As of the great wind howling,
    By which sorrow is released,
    Dismissed, absolved
    In a starry placating.
    We may return to Mozart.
    He was young, and we, we are old.
    The snow is falling
    And the streets are full of cries.
    Be seated, thou.
SNOW AND STARS
    The grackles sing avant the spring
    Most spiss—oh! Yes, most spissantly.
    They sing right puissantly.
    This robe of snow and winter stars,
    The devil take it, wear it, too.
    It might become his hole of blue.
    Let him remove it to his regions,
    White and star-furred for his legions,
    And make much bing, high bing.
    It would be ransom for the willow
    And fill the hill and fill it full
    Of ding, ding, dong.
THE SUN THIS MARCH
    The exceeding brightness of this early sun
    Makes me conceive how dark I have become,
    And re-illumines things that used to turn
    To gold in broadest blue, and be a part
    Of a turning spirit in an earlier self.
    That, too, returns from out the winter’s air,
    Like an hallucination come to daze
    The corner of the eye. Our element,
    Cold is our element and winter’s air
    Brings voices as of lions coming down.
    Oh! Rabbi, rabbi, fend my soul for me
    And true savant of this dark nature be.
BOTANIST ON ALP (NO. 1)
    Panoramas are not what they used to be.
    Claude has been dead a long time
    And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.
    Marx has ruined Nature,
    For the moment.
    For myself, I live by leaves,
    So that corridors of clouds,
    Corridors of cloudy thoughts,
    Seem pretty much one:
    I don’t know what.
    But in Claude how near one was
    (In a world that was resting on